General Outline of “Geographies of Schooling”

The 14th international Symposium on Knowledge & Space in September 2016 focuses on “Geographies of Schooling” from different perspectives. Since the introduction of compulsory education, schools have not only been in the centre of politics and ideologies, they were also a major concern of regional planning. Schools are embedded in specific socio-economic, demographic, and cultural environments, and they also shape their social and cultural environment to a certain extent. The impact of such spatial contexts and the evolution of planning ideologies and location patterns of elementary schools belong to the basic research issues of “Geographies of Schooling”.

The symposium is intended to bring together international scholars from various disciplines, different schools of thought and cultures, to foster the academic debate on recent research topics in the field of “Geographies of Schooling”. The symposium is structured along the following themes:

National and regional school systems in an evolutionary perspective.

The smaller the better? Small schools vs. large schools. Location criteria in school planning.